Advanced flooding-based routing protocols for underwater sensor networks

Flooding-based protocols are a reliable solution to deliver packets in underwater sensor networks. However, these protocols potentially involve all the nodes in the forwarding process. Thus, the performance and energy efficiency are not optimal. In this work, we propose some advances of a flooding-based protocol with the goal to improve the performance and the energy efficiency. The first idea considers the node position information in order to reduce the number of relays that may apply flooding. Second, a network coding-based protocol is proposed in order to make a better use of the duplicates. With network coding, each node in the network recombines a certain number of packets into one or more output packets. This may give good results in flooding-based protocols considering the high amount of packets that are flooded in the network. Finally, a fusion of both ideas is considered in order to exploit the benefits of both of them.